Archive for fantasy baseball sleepers

Pitchers who are adept at getting swinging strikes but not strikeouts are one of fantasy baseball’s mild annoyances. Many of us have used SwStr% as a shorthand for strikeout potential, but a few pitchers with high whiff rates fail to meet our expectations, usually because they get called strikes at a low rate. Prior to this season, Jake Odorizzi was one of those pitchers. Joe Musgrove (11.3 percent SwStr%, 19.3 percent K% in 2019) still is.

Eduardo Rodriguez does not fit this category exactly, but in the context of his past performances, he seems to be a strikeout underachiever this year. The Red Sox’s lefty entered this season with back-to-years of a SwStr% above 11 percent, outpacing the major league average for starters by more than a percentage point in both campaigns. His strikeout rates were far above average: 25.8 percent in 2017 and 26.4 percent in 2018. Yet Rodriguez achieved these rates with below-average called strike rates, with a 16.7 percent mark in 2017 and a 15.3 percent rate last season.
Read the rest of this entry »

When I recently wrote about players I took in my TGFBI draft whom I was far more bullish on than the consensus, one in particular drew a comment from a reader. Buhners Rocket Arm wanted to know the following.

Is there a write-up where you justify Bauers as the 88th overall player on your board? It’s likely you’re the high-man within the entire industry on him.

Well, now there is.
Read the rest of this entry »

In my most recent post, I lamented that I waited too long to take Greg Allen in my TGFBI draft, even though his ADP is well outside the top 300. It was as crushing a blow as one can have in Round 18 of a 15-team draft, as players with the potential to steal 20-plus bases are hard to come by, even in the earlier rounds. THE BAT projects 22 players to steal at least 20 bases this season, and Steamer projects only 19 players to reach that threshold. (ATC is more optimistic, admitting 29 players into the 20-plus projected steals club.)

Worse yet, a number of those players are across-the-board contributors (most notably Mookie Betts, Jose Ramirez, Ronald Acuna Jr., Trea Turner and Francisco Lindor) who will be long gone before the time you realize you need to catch up on steals. The reality is that it’s hard to make up for lost ground in stolen bases in the final rounds of your drafts, but that’s precisely the time you can toss up a Hail Mary. There are a handful of players who not only could give you 15 steals, but some moderate power as well, making it more worth your while to target them.
Read the rest of this entry »

In the aftermath of last Thursday’s trade that sent J.T. Realmuto from the Marlins to the Phillies, I’m started to look into how much of a hit Jorge Alfaro’s fantasy value would take going from Citizens Bank Park to Marlins Park.

The exercise turned out to be a convoluted mess. Ultimately, it led to a finding that could prove useful in identifying players who are due for spikes or dips in their power numbers.
Read the rest of this entry »

Next Monday, a new AL Rookie of the Year will be crowned, and it won’t be Jaime Barria. Though he made 26 starts in his first major league season, giving the Angels 129.1 innings of much-needed solid pitching, Barria did not grab many headlines. He made only moderate waves in fantasy circles. In CBS leagues, which tend to run deep, Barria’s ownership and activation rates peaked in early September, when he was rostered in 55 percent of leagues and started in 36 percent.

Even though the Angels’ righty finished with 10 wins and a 3.41 ERA, he ranked just 73rd among starting pitchers in Roto value (per ESPN’s Player Rater). Barria’s ERA was slimmed down by an 82.1 percent strand rate and .271 BABIP, so fantasy owners can’t be blamed for thinking he was not truly a top-75 starter. Pitchers with an 18.3 percent strikeout rate tend to not draw much interest in fantasy, and Barria did not overcome his relative lack of Ks with an avoidance of walks or homers. His walk rate was 8.8 percent, and he finished with a 1.18 HR/9. Suspicions about Barria’s value were validated by SIERA, FIP and xFIP, all of which exceeded 4.50.
Read the rest of this entry »

For a pitcher who has been ignored by the vast majority of fantasy owners this season, we’ve given Felix Pena quite a bit of attention here at RotoGraphs. Back in July, both Jeff Zimmerman and Paul Sporer noted Pena’s somewhat limited sleeper appeal. More recently, Jeff pointed out Pena’s declining fastball velocity and strikeout rate in his analysis of most-dropped players.
Read the rest of this entry »

Champions League B, an Ottoneu league in which all owners must have previously won an Ottoneu league, had its inaugural auction draft last weekend. First-year auction drafts are compelling and informative, especially when the league is made up of skilled and experienced owners. Theoretically, in first-year auctions, all players should be purchased at or near their actual value. There shouldn’t be too much obvious surplus or too many colossal overpays.

Bargain hunting is a delicate endeavor in a first-year auction. Owners can hunt for potential bargains by targeting players coming off down seasons. Andrew McCutchen comes to mind. So does Yasiel Puig. Buying such players can be risky, because their recent poor play may be indicative of future performance. However, it can also be rewarding, because if the player bounces back he may return more value than his price warrants. Having so-called surplus assets is one of several keys to success in Ottoneu.

McCutchen and Puig saw their value decline because of uncharacteristically poor performance on the field. Another type of player to target when searching for surplus is players coming off injuries. Two specific examples are among the most compelling and potentially undervalued fantasy assets in the game. They’re the same age (29), and they play on the same team. They have remarkably similar career numbers and both had season-ending injuries in 2016. Below are the career totals for underrated co-stars A.J. Pollock and David Peralta: Read the rest of this entry »

For a different publication I have recently looked at the hitters that all three of Steamer, ZiPS, and Mike Podhorzer’s projections like more and like less than their current ADP. I like this little exercise as a tool to find value. It’s admittedly not a great way to identify sleepers in the sense of identifying breakout players. But it is a good way to identify sleepers in the sense of identifying guys who should give you good return on investment, even if the margins aren’t huge.

To do this little exercise, I simply ran the Pod and ZiPS projections through the old Zach Sanders z-score method, and I took the Steamer rankings from the Auction Calculator. I based the rankings on a 12-team mixed league with 25 roster slots (aka the standard ESPN setup). I then compared the rankings to the ESPN, Yahoo, and NFBC composite ADP from FantasyPros and found the 34 guys that all three projection systems like more than their ADP. Below I’ll discuss a few of the pitchers with the biggest gap between the rankings and ADP, and at the end of the post I’ll list all 34. On Wednesday I’ll look at the pitchers that all the rankings like less than their ADP. Read the rest of this entry »

Steamer and I are good friends. It’s true – even though I don’t know Steamer’s gender, Steamer isn’t upset. We don’t always agree – often, we disagree – but that’s part of what keeps the fire alive.

Yesterday, I wrote about a couple of players whom I like more than the crowd does and, because of injuries, a lot or a little more than Steamer does. Brett Talley has blogged this month about some sleepers and busts derived from values calculated based on Steamer projections, and one of those entries is on sleeper position players, kind of an All-Sleeper Team.

To build on those things a little, and to focus on the good times Steamer and I have had, I cherry-picked from my spreadsheet of values some other position players whom Steamer projections suggest are sleepers or undervalued compared to early ADPs. I’d like them like quite a bit at their prices and would highlight them as probable targets.

Read the rest of this entry »

Steamer isn’t entirely to blame. I doubt he hurt them on purpose. I’m sure he’s a nice guy. He’s smart. He knows a lot about buckets of baseball players and learns more about them every year. I apologize, in fact, because I shouldn’t assume that Steamer is male. Based on Steamer’s intelligence and propensity to learn, it’s likelier to be a dudette.

Steamer projections are good and can save you a ton of time. What they can’t be is perfect, or even close to it. That’s good, because if they or other projections systems could be, then fantasy baseball leagues would probably be very boring. As a result, though, especially if you use Steamer projections for your rankings, you have to figure out which players about whom Steamer isn’t closer to 100% informed.

Read the rest of this entry »